Over the last few months we’ve been gathering data from the major social news and bookmark sites and looking at the type of stories that reach the popular pages on these sites. After much cursing and many finger cramps, we now have collected enough data to analyse monthly changes in popular topics. The results might not be what you expected.

We looked at around 500 stories from each site every month and in total here, our data includes over 7500 front popular stories across the sites. Although that is a relatively small number of the articles that reach the popular pages, it should still give useful indication as to how types of content perform on social news and bookmark sites.

Looking at the stats it’s interesting to see that as news about a global recession increases so have the number of popular stories about business/make money. For the first time since we started collecting this data, World & Business has overtaken Technology on Digg for being the most successful category. Will this trend continue for the next few months? Can you identify any other trends forming?

I have identified in blogs that use social media that posts of the crisis in global economy occupy places of prominence in the news aggregators like Digg.
Another trend is the focus of articles relating to Web 2.0. Articles with character tutorial about Web 2.0 has been very prominent in social media.
Nice article!